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Woman walks halfway across town after wandering from care facility

Sault Area Hospital says it is taking extra steps to secure its Plummer Transitional Care Facility after an 80-year-old patient with dementia ended up on the other side of town.

Family members say the woman left the facility on Nov. 3 despite having been equipped with a security bracelet. The woman, who suffers from Alzheimer's, then apparently made her way by foot from the Plummer site on Queen Street East to her west end home near the south end of Goulais Avenue.

Lorri Morrar said she was shocked that day to find her mother, Joyce Hill, at home rather than more than seven kilometres away at the Plummer site, where she had been staying for about a week since being transferred there from the main hospital site.

Morrar said her mother arrived home with scrapes and bruises and described being knocked over at one point in the journey when a vehicle struck the shopping cart she was pushing.

Morrar she's glad her mother made it at all.

“She had taken her socks off and put them over her hands, because her hands were cold,” said Morrar.

The hospital says it is bound by privacy laws and cannot comment directly on Hill's situation.

However, a hospital spokesperson said SAH has made a number of changes to prevent a repeat of the Nov. 3 incident.

“We do apologize, obviously, because it should never happen. There is no excuse,” said Mario Paluzzi, SAH's director of communications and public affairs.

Paluzzi said the hospital plans to be more vigilant about allowing large number of visitors at the site, which can make it easy for a patient wearing their ordinary clothes to slip out with a group.

He said the hospital has also placed larger, brighter signs at the building's stairwells asking visitors not to use them. He said the nursing station is near the stairwell location, and while nurses will recognize patients, visitors exiting may not.

Exactly why the Plummer's security system didn't prevent Morrar's mother from leaving is unclear. Morrar, who lives near her mother's home, said it was her husband who spotted Hill around 6 p.m. as he was heading to a Soo Greyhounds game.

She said the hospital phoned about 10 minutes later to inform her that her mother had gone missing.

Morrar said her mother was still wearing a security bracelet when she arrived home, and reported having left with a group of people who were using the elevator.

The Plummer's WanderGuard system should have alerted staff.

Paluzzi pointed out, however, that the hospital's stairwells are not equipped with the system, and will likely not be as the facility is slated to close in March.

He said the hospital's policy is to check on patients once an hour, though he said that could mean it could be more than two hours until staff have done a thorough check of the premises and then contacted family to make sure the patient wasn't removed inadvertently without being signed out. He said the next step is to call in police.

Paluzzi said that while situations like this one are rare, he said they are an “unfortunate reality,” faced by the hospital's main site and long-term care homes.

“If (a patient is) not happy to be there and they want to leave, oftentimes they can find a way around the system,” said Paluzzi. “Situations like this, as rare as they are, do happen and we try to learn from each one.”

Morrar said she isn't happy with the hospital's response following the incident. She said a nurse phoned to ask about her mother the night she went missing, but she didn't hear from an administrator until the next day.

Morrar said an SAH representative missed a Nov. 15 meeting the hospital had scheduled to speak with her about what happened and what the hospital has done to correct the situation.

Morrar said her mother ended up in hospital after suffering a panic attack at Great Northern Retirement Home, where family had hoped she would be able to join her husband, Don, 87.

Morrar said her father is back home too now, with no plans on leaving.